Fireball Contest Puzzle – Thursday, September 14, 2017

For the contest, Peter asks “What dance move is hinted at by this puzzle?” Let’s see.

I didn’t find all the theme answers at first and so it took a while for me to figure out what was going on. Here’s the full set – I’ll spare you the story of my mental anguish. Each theme answer has a number hidden within.

19a [Author of the book “Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me!”] is JESSE VENTURA.

21a [Hear] is GET WORD.

33a [Either of a pair of cylinders in a wringer] is, apparently, a SQUEEZE ROLL.

44a [Camera line named for a Greek goddess] is the CANON EOS.

54a [Precolonial state of West Africa] is the BENIN EMPIRE.

70a [Short-lived soda release of 1995] is PEPSI XL.

73a [Toast a sub for?] has nothing to do with Quiznos. It’s BURN IN EFFIGY.

That gives us 7 2 0 1 9 6 9. Change the spacing a bit and you get 7/20/1969, the date when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. This became a dance known ’round the world in 1982 when Michael Jackson first did the MOONWALK on national television. Ta-da!

Erik, you know I love you, and I usually love your puzzles….I appreciate the feat of construction here – finding answers with the correct digits and sorting them into a grid in the proper order can’t have been easy. It wasn’t a whole lot of fun to solve, in part because SQUEEZE ROLL sounds completely contrived. Don’t yell at me; I’m sure it’s in a dictionary somewhere, but who among us has ever used a washer with a mangle and who knew the cylinders had a name other than “cylinder?” The others are at least in the language, although PEPSI XL is danged obscure.

The rest of the fill did not redeem the puzzle; the constraints of the theme answers require a lot of very short fill and that’s always a risk. I like the NW corner with AWW and D’OH clued as [“Dang, that sucks”] and [“Dang, I messed up!”]. I was less fond of the SE corner with NIA, JOB and RMS, especially since NIA was clued with someone I never heard of. My bad, I’m sure you all knew who she was.

I did enjoy 37d [1930s Hollywood star who played the same role as his father], which turned out to be RIN TIN TIN JR.

What I did not know before I did this puzzle: see above re: RIN TIN TIN JR, SQUEEZE ROLL and PEPSI XL. I also did not know that Antonio Banderas appeared in an Almodovar film called MATADOR.

I leave you with, of course, the MOONWALK, and a reminder of the talent that was lost. The more I watch Emma grow as a dancer, the more I appreciate that Michael Jackson was one of the finest dancers of our generation. The relevant section starts at 5:35.